The present invention relates generally to the field of virtual guest operating systems, and more particularly to accessing non-functional host capabilities and services.
A hypervisor, also referred to as a virtual machine monitor (VMM), is computer software, firmware, or hardware on a host computer that can create and execute one or more virtual machines (e.g., guest operating system), also referred to as guest computers. A hypervisor provides a guest operating system (OS) with a virtual operating environment and manages the execution of the guest operating systems. A hypervisor allows multiple instances for a variety of guest operating systems to share the virtualized hardware resources of a host. For example, operating system instances such as Linux, Windows, and MacOS can all execute on the same host computer (Note: the terms “Linux,” “Windows,” and “MacOS” may be subject to trademark rights in various jurisdictions throughout the world and are used herein only in reference to the products or services properly denominated by the marks to the extent that such trademark rights may exist). Two types of hypervisors that exist in today's computing environments are Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors. A Type 1 hypervisor is installed directly on a host computer's hardware to control the hardware of the host computer and to manage all guest operating systems. A Type 2 hypervisor can support guest virtual machines by coordinating calls for CPU, memory, disk, network and other resources through the physical host's operating system.
Paravirtualization is a virtualization technique that provides a software interface to virtual machines that is similar to the underlying hardware-software interface. The provided software interface reduces execution times that a guest operating system can spend performing operations which are substantially more difficult to run in a virtual environment compared to a non-virtualized environment.